The Lottery and Other Stories

Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” absolutely belongs on this list—not because the children appear to be strange or unsettling, but because they are hauntingly, terrifyingly normal.

With cheerily objective prose, Jackson captures a gathering of friends and families on a single morning where the children play and laugh until it’s time to participate in the community’s horrifying annual tradition. I don’t want to spoil the story by saying more, but I promise, this is a must-read for more than shock value. Nature versus nurture, indeed. 

I read as a writer. Can’t help it. I read with my noggin gobbling up what I can learn from any given author. But occasionally that author’s skill seems unattainable. So it is with Shirley Jackson. Her masterful handling of situation and character takes my breath away. At her best, Jackson is in complete control of the unsaid, and the merely suggested. 

About the only thing I remember reading in Ms. Robinson’s English class was The Lottery. That story opened my mind to the power of fiction, and as I can understand now, of handling narrative, and choreographing tension.… show more.

The story, The Lottery, from Jackson’s collection, held particular horror for me because we see this happen in real life. Not the exact details, of course, but mob mentality and the going along with things taught us without ever questioning what it means. This story evokes human trauma about adults who say and do nothing. A genuinely terrifying aspect of human nature gone awry and the utter lack of respect for life. 

I mean, come on. We’ve all read The Lottery. This is a collection of works from a master of fiction. We dissected that story in nearly every literature class I took in college, and it never got old. That ability to exploit the darkness in the very mundane has always been a staple of horror, and no one does that better than Jackson. And while the subject matter for many of her stories may not have always been hot topics at the time, they're quite relevant now in the clarity of their message.